An interesting finding of this recent research is that the different approaches to therapy do not appear to produce significantly different impacts upon personality traits. This parallels a finding that has been reported in past outcome research: the various therapies appear to work more because of shared, common factors than because of their unique elements.

My colleagues at SUNY Upstate Medical University's Department of Psychiatry, Mantosh Dewan, M.D. and Roger Greenberg, Ph.D., and I surveyed the major evidence-based forms of brief therapies in a recent text. Our review found that a number of common factors appear to catalyze the change process in therapy, allowing profound changes to occur, often within a matter of months. These effective ingredients include:

Active Engagement - The use of a supportive helping relationship to encourage and sustain focused change efforts and promote an environment of hope and optimism;

Discrepancy - The ability of the therapy to provide powerful emotional experiences that disrupt old patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior and promote the exploration of new patterns;

Consolidation - The ongoing reinforcement and rehearsal of the new patterns so that these become internalized as fresh parts of the self.

As in the research of Roberts and colleagues, our overview found that not all people benefit equally from short-term intervention. Those with long-standing, severe concerns typically require larger "doses" of therapy to achieve positive effects. Those with more recent and circumscribed issues typically achieve significant changes within ten sessions.

This has important implications beyond the therapy office. Recent work in positive psychology finds that physical health and emotional wellbeing are enhanced when we consistently exercise personal strengths and virtues. Could it be the case that short-term therapy techniques not only reduce emotional and behavioral problems and alter personality traits, but can also enhance and build such positive qualities as gratitude, optimism, resilience, and creativity?

One approach, solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), explicitly avoids the focus on problem patterns typically found among other modalities and instead looks for occasions in which problems do not occur and we come closer to reaching our goals. The idea is to use therapy, not to solve problems, but to do more of what works: find the solutions hidden in plain sight in our daily lives and build those into competencies.

A portfolio manager in financial markets might seek me out, frustrated with making poor trading decisions. Utilizing a solution-focused framework, we begin a survey of the manager's best trades and best trading periods. We create a laundry list of what the manager does when he or she is particularly successful: how he generates good ideas, how he translates those ideas into trades with favorable reward relative to risk, how he manages the risk of those trades, how he assembles the trades into balanced portfolios, etc. Such a survey creates a set of "best practices" distinctive to that trader. Those best practices can anchor checklists that help ensure that the money manager is doing more of what works.

In such a case, what we find is that, over the course of our work together, the portfolio manager becomes more mindful, more emotionally intelligent regarding thoughts and feelings that impact decision making, more optimistic and energized about their work, and more open-minded and flexible in generating and expressing their market views. Over the course of a relatively brief intervention, existing virtues strengthen and new ones begin to emerge. The trader who had been making decisions rather impulsively now is displaying unusual self-awareness, reflective capacity, and self-control.

Such therapy for the mentally well is one of the great frontiers of positive psychology. If we can alter longstanding problem patterns and personality traits with evidence-based helping methods, surely we can use these approaches to help people more closely approximate their ideals. Find the occasions in which we are already successful in our work, our romantic and family lives, and our personal pursuits. Then reverse-engineer those occasions and find the template for more consistently enacting and extending that success.

Imagine the implications for leadership: managing a workforce by truly accessing and enhancing human resources. When we do more of what works, we exercise our strengths and virtues and become stronger, more virtuous. That is the power of the solution focus.

I am Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY. I work as a performance coach for hedge fund portfolio managers and traders and have written several books on trading psychology. I have also written s...